Transudative and Exudative Pleural Effusion in Chronic Kidney Disease Patients: A Prospective Single-Center Study

Objective The aim of the study is to assess the incidence of pleural effusion and to assess its etiology in admitted chronic kidney disease patients who were admitted secondary to various causes, i.e., fluid overload, sepsis, etc. Material and methods A prospective cross-sectional observational study was conducted at the Department of Nephrology, The Kidney Centre Postgraduate Training Institute, Karachi. A total of 789 patients were admitted between August 2020-February 2021. This study comprised 280 adult chronic kidney disease (chronic kidney disease and end-stage renal disease patients who were on dialysis) patients having pleural effusion (either unilateral or bilateral) secondary to various causes.  Results Among 280 patients, the mean age was 55 years with 158 (56.4%) males and 122 (43.6%) females, diabetes (76%) was present in most of the patients along with hypertension (86.1%), and most of the patients were of stage IV and V. Transudative pleural effusion was present in 212 (75.7%) patients secondary to fluid overload and heart failure was the commonest cause while 68 (24.3%) patients had exudative pleural effusion with tuberculosis being the commonest etiology, 44 (15.7%) patients needed intervention while 236 (84.3%) were treated medically. The data was entered and analyzed on SPSS version 21 (IBM Corp, Armonk, USA). The cleaning and coding of data were done before analysis. Continuous variables were expressed in mean ± standard deviation, while the frequencies with percentages were obtained for categorical variables. The Chi-square test was applied to see the association between variables. A p-value of ≤ 0.05 was considered significant. Conclusion Clarification of the cause of pleural effusion is essential. Early diagnosis and prompt treatment like thoracocentesis or in the case of patients on hemodialysis, adequate dialysis may be necessary.